Chapter IV

The Soul of Poetic Delight

and Beauty

T

HE LIGHT of truth, the breath of life, great and potent
things though they are, are insufficient to give poetry
the touch of immortality and perfection, even a little of
which is enough to carry it safe through the ages, unless the soul
and form of delight and beauty take possession of the seeing of
truth and give immortality to the breath and body of the life.
Delight is the soul of existence, beauty the intense impression,
the concentrated form of delight; and these two fundamental
things tend to be one for the mind of the artist and the poet,
though they are often enough separated in our cruder vital and
mental experience. These twin powers meet, make a consonance
of the perfect harmony of his work and are the first deities he
serves, all the others only group themselves about them, strive to
be admitted to the soul of delight and the privilege of beauty and
have to make themselves acceptable to them before they can mix
with them in a compelling and attracting oneness. For the poet
the moon of beauty and delight is a greater godhead even than
the sun of truth or the breath of life, as in the symbolic image
of the Vedic moon-god Soma, whose plant of intoxication has
to be gathered on lonely mountain heights in the moonlight and
whose purified juice and essence is the sacred wine and nectar of
sweetness,rasa,madhu,amr.ta, without which the gods them-
selves could not be immortal. A lightest trifle, if it manages to get
itself saturated with this sweetness of poetic delight and beauty,
will be preserved for its sake, while the highest strenuous labour
of the thinking mind and the most forceful assertion of the life-
power, if deprived of or deficient in this subtlest immortalising
essence, may carry on for a time, but soon drops, grows old,
sinks into the gulf of oblivion or has at most a lifeless survival